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Friday, 15 July 2016

Je Suis... Redux.

All my life, it seems, little armies have been taking their grievances out on ordinary people eating, drinking, shopping, celebrating, singing, sleeping, walking, working, playing, crying.

Growing up in Northern Ireland, our news was almost daily filled with atrocities carried out on crushed families, carrying their fathers, mothers and children to cemeteries across the six counties. And far from preserving or helping a cause, all these acts have done is divide and aide bitterness that still lives on in Ireland. Although time is healing some wounds, bitterness against those who used families as their causes machine gun fodder still poisons many a heart. Though of course, as I say, time is healing, as are words spoken in the media, to neighbours and in courtrooms and hearings. Voices of victims and oppressed people are being heard and divisions -slowly- and as peacefully as possible, are being bridged.

Little armies smash, kill, maim, causing desperate, unquenchable grief, all the time negating their cause- sometimes just- sometimes a cry for help- sometimes a last resort, by tearing the life out of people far removed from their cause by the gulf created by the media, language, cultural difference, years.

Terrorism, whether it comes from a little army or one paid by taxes, is never going to bring justice. It will always bring repercussions that are bloody or full of hate and revenge.

And terrorism makes victims of us all- from the plotters, their families, their cause- through to the victims, their families and their mediated solutions.

There is something badly wrong with the world when someone feels their voice can only be heard through horror meted out on innocent people. Something badly wrong when oppressed people's causes are represented by a tiny army of angry, desperate, murderous thugs. The only voices we hear are the explosion of bloody terror and the cries and sobs of the victims and their families.

The world is wrong when a Peace Envoy is the man who enabled and armed extremist thugs to carry out explosions in cities that kill over 200 innocent people; enabled and enraged people enough to bomb buses and railways; enabled and gave encouragement to people enough to massacre people eating and laughing in restaurants; enabled and gave excuse to murder to untreated psychotics who mow people down in the street who were celebrating freedom.

And the world is wrong when the poor are taught to scapegoat by millionaire newspaper and media outlets, taking out their anger on people who have fled from towns and cities targeted by little armies and huge armies, as a result of what a peace envoy did along with a religious maniac of a President, back at the dawn of a new millennia.

In Ireland, will everyone forgive those who took their grievances out on their loved ones? Mostly not. But will these people call for revenge killings of a perceived "other" to quench their grief? No. That idiocy is over.

The present international fora for talking are not up to the mark. The voices of the oppressed people of Palestine, Iraq, Turkey, Syria, Saudi Arabia and the North African and middle eastern countries blighted by the worlds thirst for oil and religious answers of the ancient world must be heard- and when they are, the dreadful cacophony of death, grief and bloody revenge will be drowned out.

War is not an answer. Air strikes, drone strikes, land strikes and tit for tat leads to more innocent families grieving and calls for vengeance.